News

Industry Experts to Share Business Insights at W3C’s First Executive Forum, 8 November in San Francisco

Executives from Alipay, American Express, Bloomberg, HARMAN, Google, Intel, Mozilla, Samsung, Southern Nevada Regional Transportation Agency, University of Sydney, Worldpay and Yubico, together with Web Inventor and W3C Director Sir Tim Berners-Lee, will address emerging tech trends and the impact of the Web on business and industry at the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) inaugural Web Executive Forum.

“Web application areas are revolutionizing many business models in Digital Publishing, FinTech, Automotive, Telco, Smart Manufacturing and Entertainment. W3C has created an event designed to provide value and insight to executives across a wide range of industries with a goal of providing rich content and some food for thought,” said J. Alan Bird, W3C Global Business Development Leader.

ODRL Information Model—The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is a policy expression language that provides a flexible and interoperable information model, vocabulary, and encoding mechanisms for representing statements about the usage of content and services. The ODRL Information Model describes the underlying concepts, entities, and relationships that form the foundational basis for the semantics of the ODRL policies. Policies are used to represent permitted and prohibited actions over a certain asset, as well as the obligations required to be meet by stakeholders. In addition, policies may be limited by constraints (e.g., temporal or spatial constraints) and duties (e.g. payments) may be imposed on permissions.

Upcoming Workshop: WebVR Authoring: Opportunities and Challenges

The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together WebVR stakeholders to identify unexploited opportunities as well as technical gaps in WebVR authoring.

Participants in the workshop will:

Share good practices and novel techniques in creating WebVR-based content

Discuss existing and foreseen challenges in using WebVR to deploy content and services in specific usages

Contribute to the unification of efforts for documenting and advocating the development of WebVR content

Attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members. Our aim is to get a diversity of attendees from a variety of industries and communities, including:

360° video and VR content producers and distributors

VR experience designers and artists

3D, VR and WebVR authoring tools and platforms

authors of WebVR content

experts in challenges and opportunities of VR for people with disabilities

Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is a W3C Recommendation

The HTML Media Extensions Working Group published Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as a W3C Recommendation today. Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), which extends the ‘HTMLMediaElement’ element of the HTML specification, is an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows playback of protected content in Web browsers. Combined with W3C’s Recommendation Media Source Extensions (MSE) which provides the API for streaming video, EME is the most common practice today that allows Web developers to stop using plugins to deliver commercial quality video over the Web. Please read more in our Press Release.

Web Commerce Interest Group Rechartered with New Mission

W3C has just rechartered the Web Commerce Interest Group to improve Commerce on the Web for users, merchants, and other stakeholders. This charter represents the next iteration of the Web Payments Interest Group. Changes to the charter reflect the broader scope of Interest Group discussions that have been taking place over the past year, including topics such as:

digital offers (coupons, loyalty, etc.)

payments from a variety of devices, including mobile devices, automobiles (in-car payments), televisions, virtual reality, and Internet of Things devices

various aspects of payment flow, including initiation of payment, recurring payments, receipts, and refunds

Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description: This document describes a formal model and common representation for a Web of Things Thing Description. A Thing Description describes the metadata and interfaces of Things, where a Thing is an abstraction of a physical entity that provides interactions to and participates in the Web of Things.

Web of Things (WoT) Scripting API: This document describes a programming interface representing the WoT Interface that allows scripts run on a Thing to discover and consume (retrieve) other Things and to expose Things characterized by Properties, Actions and Events.

The group is planning to publish the third building block, WoT Binding Templates, as a First Public Working Draft shortly.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today called for broad implementation and testing of Web technologies to make online checkout easier for users and improve conversions and security for merchants. All major browser makers are now implementing Payment Request API and Payment Method Identifiers, which today advanced to Candidate Recommendation Status. The Web Payments Working Group encourages merchants, Web developers, and users to experiment with these early implementations and provide feedback to the group. In parallel, the Working Group will be expanding its test suite for the API to help ensure browser interoperability. Read more in the W3C Media Advisory and blog post.

First Public Working Draft: Intersection Observer

The Web Platform Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Intersection Observer. This specification describes an API that can be used to understand the visibility and position of DOM elements (“targets”) relative to a containing element or to the top-level viewport (“root”). The position is delivered asynchronously and is useful for understanding the visibility of elements and implementing pre-loading and deferred loading of DOM content.